Sharing the Hacketse Trophy

3 min read /

We have held ten hackathons over a period of three years, and until last week, we've never had two winners.

While there were many exciting projects, the two winners, Francesco and Matthias (both from team Backbone) brought home a landslide win. Let's have a look why. 

Backbone diagnostics on the go

Francesco wanted to make Backbone administrators' work easier by integrating a HipChat room with a Backbone.

Backbone diagnostics run through HipChat

After pulling an all-nighter, he was able to run diagnostics, as well as start and stop Backbone integrations and more by entering commands in HipChat. Here are a few of them:

  • scan integration status
  • set scan interval
  • report backbone version
  • show integrations
  • retrieve detailed info on errors if found
  • start/stop integrations

This way, administrators are not only notified via a HipChat message if an integration error occurs, but they can also run diagnostics, stop and restart integrations. All from within HipChat, no matter whether they are using their desktop at work or their phone while traveling – that's what we would call Backbone diagnostics on the go.

Feature importance aggregation tool

Matthias worked on a JIRA tool that makes judging a feature's importance much easier.

Multiple factors influence the decision which product features will be released next – customer requests and votes, the number of related tickets, and internal development needs. Matthias thought it would be easier to plan new features according to an aggregated importance score which would be influenced by all these factors. Hence, the idea for the feature importance aggregation tool was born.

Feature importance aggregation tool considers user votes, Zendesk tickets and internal development importance

It allows you to quickly judge which features are most anticipated and relevant, leading to even more satisfied customers.

Congratulations

Both ideas were so popular that our team members couldn't decide which was better. Congratulations to both on winning K15t's tenth 'Hacketse', and being our first co-winners. 

What's Hacketse?

At K15t Software, hackathons are called 'Hacketse'. It's a wordplay on a local German tradition in Baden-Württemberg, the area where K15t Software is based. This tradition is called 'Hocketse' and is the rough equivalent of a day-long block party. A perfect fit, as our hackathons are also about people coming together to make great things happen within one day.

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